Lucas Stoffel

The Goldfinch Book Review: Theo Decker is thirteen when a bomb goes off in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, killing his mother and changing the course of his life forever. In the chaos and dust, he takes a small painting — The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius, a real painting, a real masterpiece — and carries it home. That painting becomes the axis around which his entire life spins for the next fourteen years, through foster homes in New York, a surreal adolescence in Las Vegas w

Crying in H Mart Book Review: I knew this book was going to wreck me. You don't pick up a memoir called Crying in H Mart expecting to leave emotionally intact. But I didn't expect it to wreck me this specifically, this precisely, in ways I'm still thinking about weeks later.

You've Reached Sam Book Review: Here is what I can tell you about Dustin Thao after reading both his novels. He writes loneliness the way most writers write romance. It is the thing he keeps his eye on. You've Reached Sam is his debut, and it is where he figured out that grief in YA does not have to be loud.

You've Found Oliver Book Review: When Dustin Thao announced a companion novel to You've Reached Sam, I expected a gentle variation on the original. A different narrator, same grief, same magical realism, slightly different angle. What I got was a book that takes the rules of the first novel and quietly breaks them, and then uses the broken pieces to tell a queer love story that no one else in YA is writing right now.

Dustin Thao's When Haru Was Here is his sophomore novel after You've Reached Sam, which was already proof that this author understands loneliness the way some writers understand plot or dialogue. It's his native language. And in When Haru Was Here, he's become even more fluent in it.

Remarkably Bright Creatures Book Review: Here's the pitch, and I need you to stay with me: a lonely seventy-something widow named Tova works the night shift mopping floors at an aquarium. During those shifts, she develops a relationship with Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus in one of the tanks. Marcellus is old, he's dying, and he's smarter than almost every human who walks past his enclosure. He also knows the answer to a mystery that has haunted Tova for thirty years...

They Both Die at the End: The title tells you exactly what happens. They both die at the end. Adam Silvera puts that information right there on the cover, dares you to care anyway, and you do. You care so much it feels unfair.